Where To Begin?

Without going into the "a long, long, time ago" internet/search engine speech, I want to provide an Archimedean point (I'll try to keep the philosophy to a minimum), upon which to build to our lawyer internet marketing knowledge base.

I'm going to start my internet marketing story with a central figure, Larry Page. Lawrence "Larry" Page is a US computer scientist best known as co-founder of Google Inc.

What Larry did, and now what Google does, was to recognize that the entire Web was loosely based on the premise of academic citation – after all, what is a link but a citation?

So, he (with the help of others) devised a method to count and qualify each backlink on the Web (PageRank from which evolved, the Google algorithm).

Still too confusing? Here's another way of looking at it.

Each link on the internet is a vote for the website to which it links.

For example a link on Website A to Website B is a vote from A for B.

However, this democracy is not equal (but then again, show me one that ever is). Some websites carry much more voting "clout" than others. For example, a vote from CNN.com has a lot more weight than say, my blog.

So, what Google does, as well as other search engines, is moderates this "web election". It returns the "winners" in order of votes received for any particular search.

Ok, now we have our Archimedean point, next we'll talk about actually winning these elections.